Post
Topic
Board Hardware wallets
Re: Generate 12 word seed for hardware wallet
by
bob123
on 17/07/2018, 13:30:17 UTC
In my opinion the only way to be secure from seizure of your funds is to memorize the seed. With 12 words it's much easier. This is why I need to generate the 12 words.

Thats a horrible idea.
Even if you are going to memorize the 12 words, without a proper backup this is just careless.
There are a lot of things which can happen which lead to a loss of your memory (e.g. car accident, alzheimer, trauma, shock moment, ...).

Your whole cryptos would be gone in this case. A proper backup (better: 2 or 3) is a must have.



I am sure someone can help with this. Explain it to me, I understand I may need to purchase an offline laptop which is ok.

There are a lot of ways to generate a random number. In the end thats all you need.
The easiest (and one of the safest) way would probably be to boot a linux distro (offline) and do some stuff (so the internal entropy pool gets filled), then get a 256 bit number from dev/urandom (don't use dev/random!) and convert it manually to a 12 word seed (with the BIP39 word list). You will need to calculate the last bits of the last word (since they are basically a checksum).

For more information take a look at https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki and https://github.com/trezor/python-mnemonic.